Smear campaign works as intended
Someone started a rumor that a local restaurant was involved in a child trafficking ring run by Clinton. The restaurant and its employees received a lot of threats on the phone and online.
Today some heavily armed dung ball took things to the next illogical step.
A North Carolina man was arrested Sunday after he walked into a popular pizza restaurant in Northwest Washington carrying an assault rifle and fired one or more shots, D.C. police said. The man told police he had come to the restaurant to “self-investigate” an election-related conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton that spread online during her presidential campaign.
It didn’t matter that the target of the smear is a business in an affluent section of a large city. And since this sort of shit splashes, other businesses have received threats.
Matt Carr, the owner of the Little Red Fox market and coffee shop, said his business started getting threats last weekend. They got 30 to 40 calls before they stopped answering calls from blocked numbers, he said. “One person said he wanted to line us up in front of a firing squad,” said Carr, who spent more than an hour in lockdown with his employees Sunday.
Politics & Prose, one of the few surviving independent bookstores in the city, has also received threats.
So like that, a lot of people have learned firsthand that some faceless person can on a whim deliver irrationally scary shit right to their doorstep. And their only hope is people will get distracted and find someone else to bother. There’s no off switch for this sort of thing.
And we haven’t even started four years of Donald Trump the Tweetin’ President!
Seems like it’s a good time to sue someone for libel and slander.
And arm up.
I don’t know enough to splash cold water on this idea in an informed manner, but I’m skeptical; some questions:
1) Under what law? DC is under federal law, which I’m (anecdotally) informed does not actually include laws about libel or slander.
2) Anything involving the courts is hella expensive and inconceivably slow, and given to perverse outcomes. Pizza restaurants and indie coffee houses or bookstores, even popular ones in wealthy neighborhoods, aren’t usually swimming in extra cash nor do their executives have free time to kill. Any hope the expenses would be repaid after the verdict should be discounted by both the incredibly long time factor and the possibility of one of those perverse outcomes I mentioned, or simply an indigent defendant.
3) Speaking of which: what damages do you sue for? Can you prove their business has suffered, beyond an afternoon’s closure and some plaster repairs? Can you sue for legal expenses? For lost time and “mental anguish”? And win?
4) And then there’s the other side, the risk that libel/slander laws will make the courts a playground for the sort of people who have lawyers on retainer, a toy with which to abuse their critics, the way it used to be in England fifty years ago.
PS “Arm up”? What are you, twelve? This is DC, with plenty of law enforcement close to hand. Camera up, maybe. I can only assume that excessive guns in the workplace will, as in the home, far more often shoot innocents in mishaps than they ever threaten a miscreant of any sort.
Yeah, just close all the doors, pile furniture in front of them, activate the motion sensors, and sit with your back to a wall while cradling a gun for the rest of your life. That’s freedom.
Makes it hard to sell pizzas though.
If I weren’t prone to depression, I would probably already be heavily armed and practise shooting several times a week. Sadly, I don’t think that will ever be an option for me; the risk of committing suicide because a gun is in the house is too great for me to contemplate the security benefits it might otherwise bring.
Yeah, I had pretty much the same thought, for the same reasons. Well, depression and also complete klutziness. I’d end up shooting myself in the foot by accident.
It’d be a mix of depression and paranoia, for myself.
I’d be lucky if I only shot myself in the foot.
So apparently yesterday or today Orange McRapey Littlescrotum issued a tweet (or someone did, in his name) in the “can’t we all just get along” vein.
Which somehow just didn’t get the market penetration that “build that wall – Mexican rapists” or “round up all the Muslims” or hiring a Nazi did.
Somehow.
ETA: And it was a white guy, so of course he can’t be a terrorist.
You know, we don’t live in a 1960s era Dragnet episode where it takes 2 minutes to trace a phone call. If this was a call threatening someone the powers that be care about that person would be identified, arrested, photo splashed on news media, and getting interrogated within an hour. Ditto with internet threats. I’m baffled why these anonymous assholes are allowed to continue to do this.
Question answers itself.
I don’t go into the conspiracy fever swamps (I don’t need another stroke) but I get the impression that the sheer volume of the nutcakes precludes too much individual investigation.
Also the lawyers can get into the details, but I’m sure there are questions of origin vs destination jurisdiction, fourth amendment issues, subpoenas, etc.
Most people believe that where there’s smoke there’s fire, and there’s justice in the world, and people don’t get threats unless they did something to deserve them somehow, or at least displayed poor judgment in some respect. Most people still believe that the Internet and social media are “optional,” like going to all-night clubs in sketchy neighborhoods, and danger that arises from that quarter is danger that arises from the victim’s own risky behavior. Most people believe the world is relatively safe and that anything that sounds ridiculous is probably a joke or a prank, or maybe the victim’s own fever dreams.
I think you underestimate the work involved. You have to prove it was a threatening call – do you record all your calls? Do you live someplace it’s even legal to do so? Then there’s the question of how interested the cops would be by a threatening call lacking any evidence of actual violent action. Maybe if they called a bunch of times the cops might act. But then there’s jurisdictional issues (the caller may not be in the same state, especially if the victim is in DC), and there’s a whole bunch of reasons the caller might not be identified quite so easily. Maybe they used a VOIP system, adding a significant layer of difficulty in tracking down the source, which could turn out to be the parking lot of a McDonalds (free WiFi!). Maybe they used a burner phone they bought with cash. Maybe they found a payphone, or borrowed a phone.
Indeed, if it is easy to trace them (given how easy it is not to be traced) the cops might take that as evidence they’re not serious!
I have heard of cases of people getting the police or courts to help them, though most, I think, involved their hiring detectives or security consultants to represent their case for them.
I’ve heard of some, too. But I think of those “SWATting” monstrosities, which so obviously need to be investigated (deadly force is summoned! Public expense is incurred!) and which offend the law enforcement community and which they can’t ignore – and which (so far as I’ve heard about them) so rarely resulted in the identification of the perpetrator or their prosecution. And that’s people calling the police, on lines likely to be monitored, in a manner ideally designed to trigger investigation!
I can definitely see the content of the call not being proven as a reason for hesitating to do a search. And jurisdictional issues might get in the way – for these it would be nice to have a clear law allowing searches, and frankly most of the time such a call would make it an FBI issue because it would cross state lines.
So I can see the legal barriers. Technically, though, it’s never going to be hard once the appropriate CALEA request is given to the service provider. So this is more a case of not deciding from the top down that they are going to crack down on this shit, rather than throwing up their hands and saying the technology doesn’t support it.
(Until relatively recently I worked in that industry.)
Imagine the outcome if the perp had been black or muslim. The cops would have smoked him, no questions asked.
FFS, talk about burying the lede: “Even Michael Flynn, a retired general who President-elect Donald Trump has tapped to advise him on national security, shared the stories.”
“Miss Eva Vavoom” posted a Twit that said
“What is #pizzagate? Tens of thousands of people worried about the abuse and destruction of small bodies by protected & immune monsters.”
Jesus [and FSM, various other gods, demigods, and all the saints and apostles] wept – YHGTBSM.
Oh, and another nim-null twits that it is an obvious false flag. I did expect that one.
The fake news penetration is utterly alarming, folks. I have friends and co-workers who I would never, ever have expected to fall for this kind of equine excrement who have breathlessly repeated this and many other pieces of fakery. And of course, when I point out the illogic of them and/or guide them to well sourced debunking sites, they refuse to believe, because they ‘trust their friends, or Fox, or, or . . .”
I wasn’t really scared until the last few weeks. My level of anxiety is increasing on a near daily basis, and the POTUSE hasn’t yet been sworn in. At by me, yes, but not in.
The piece of shit who murdered my sister in law was a conspiracy and fake news nutter years before it was fashionable. That he ended up a drunk murdering bastard wasn’t really that much of a surprise.
My wife and I were driving on Connecticut Avenue this afternoon and when we hit the cordon (actually just yellow police tape across the road, but pretty effective once you saw the mass of flashing lights past it), I wondered if it was at Comet Ping Pong. I’m glad (obviously) that nobody was hurt, but this really was just a matter of time.
As noted above, trying to find someone to sue for defamation who would be worth suing would be difficult. This started with a fake news story and has been festering in the darker corners of the Internet, not a place famous for having people with deep pockets. The best hope these folks have is that the story will die down eventually.
Thanks Reddit.
In 2020, I will guarantee that someone here will be arguing with a troll who will say, “What about that pedophile Hillary Clinton, huh, libtard?” Rightwing internet memes never die.
Pompous words for public onanism. Truly, America has never been more grating.